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Socialist Surrealism

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Matt Wardman on February 10, 2013

This week we have an object lesson in what happens when you dig up the the dead Victorian body of your Great Grandparent, prop it up in the hallway in a sharp 2012 suit, and hope that your friends will gasp in admiration.

It doesn’t work.

Instead it appears as a Victorian skeleton in 2012 clothing.

The post photo above is a new attempt to communicate one of the versions of ‘Socialism’ to modern man and woman.

They have discovered the online magazine format, and the groupuscule are putting forward the need for another class struggle.

The picture used as an illustration is a piece of ‘Social Realism’, depicting ‘Woman Metro Builder with Pneumatic Drill’ (*), (1937) by Aleksandr Samokhvalov.

“It shows a woman shock-worker briefly resting from excavating the tunnel for the Moscow Metro. In reality it is a Palladian scene; classical and statuesque, there is a stillness about her face, which is strongly illuminated from the front, and as she gazes into the bright light, we almost see the socialist Arcadia she is seeing, the disclosed/hidden, future/past utopia.

One half-clenched hand, plump and dainty, unmarked by labour, rests upon a rock; she has tied her jacket round her waist and the effect is of a classicial, robed piece of statuary that seems to have emerged from the living rock; the face is youthful, plastic, inquisitive, robustly beautiful and determined: there is defiance in her eyes. Whatever this painting is of, it is not of a woman metro builder (but there were tens of thousands of women volunteers, often office workers, who did help dig the tunnels, even during lunch-breaks; it is them the painting celebrates, not as they are but as they should be.”

This is via the nice people at Socialist Unity (for whom I have a soft spot), and the related Socially Unified Commentariat. As the commentator says of this description:

…strikes me as rather pretentious bollocks

Samokhavalov trained at the Imperial Art Academy in St Petersburg before the Revolution. His style is more or less post-Impressionist and any socialist message is skin-deep.

In reality 1937 was a year of mass repression in the USSR. Once the repression was all over, Samokhvalov reverted to painting fairly conventional nudes.

It is nice to see that consumerism cannot be extinguished even in a Dictatorship.

Other articles inside explain why the Morning Star newspaper needs charitable support to bring in the revolution, and tell us why it is still all the fault of imperialism (again). Try reading a little more on Stalinist Art without gnawing your left leg down to a bloody stump:

It is not just a matter of the Stalinist liquidation of the avant-garde and their substitution by the alleged aridities of socialist-realism. The real issue is more serious and universal: freedom of expression versus the interests and rights of the state. The Bolsheviks arrogated the right to subordinate art to politics, meaning, to the creation of their dictatorship. Still more heroically, Lenin even wanted not merely to use art for his own purposes but to insist theoretically that art could not even be art unless it served those purposes.

If you grant that art is a class question and must be subordinated to a class politics, then you take your stand with Lenin’s frankly ‘totalitarian’ subordination of art to political life and the interests of the state. Art has no more autonomy than any other sphere of life. The proletarian dictatorship insists on its subjugation. It is clear too that Stalin was the executor of Lenin’s behests, and you cannot separate Lenin’s policy from Stalin’s. If Lenin was wrong, so was Stalin. If both were wrong then we have to admit that the socialist revolutionary project contains a radical defect and cannot be the instrument of human freedom. So the question is important.

Ironically, both Lenin and Stalin turned out to be conservators of bourgeois cultural forms. Lenin destroyed the Proletkult and called instead for the preservation of the finest achievements of bourgois culture, and for making them accessible to the masses. Stalin in his time purged the avant-garde, accusing it of ‘formalism’ and even drove Mayakovsky to his grave. However in terms of the principled question it would not have mattered if the Party had done things the other way round, ie, purged the Socialist Realists and the Victorian novelists and made the practitioners of Proletkult into honoured representatives of official Soviet art. The issue would still be, does the Party have the right to decide which art and which artists shall survive and prosper, and which shall be silenced and purged?

That little lot tells you much of what you need to know about why the British extreme left is where it is today. Every time I read something like this I am reminded of commentaries that used to be on pre-Gorbachev Radio Moscow.

It is starting from somewhere bizarre shrouded in eccentric mythology, and going nowhere any time soon.

The medium does not help if the message is from Mars.

* I have corrected the description. In the original comment it was “Penumatic Drill”, which deserves a prize for Freudian Slip of the Year. Who needs a washing machine on spin cycle?

Can’t see much difference from the then contemporary Right, and probably even the current one too. For instance, the Hays Committee didn’t do much different, and you could write about the American Right’s purging of American artistic activities in similar vein. But of course, maybe non leftists just do it from the most pure motives, to ensure that better taste prevails? eg

Lúthien Tinúviel was the Morning Star and her great-great-grandaughter, Arwen Undómiel, the Evening Star (vi Dior, Elwing and Elrond). Both chose the same path (mortality) and their loss from halls of immortality is considered a great tragedy by the Elves.

Galadriel is Arwen’s grandmother (via her daughter Celebrían, Elrond’s wife) and the first cousin once removed of Lúthien.

That’s one sexy woman! She could rest one plump and dainty half-clenched hand on my rock anytime she wanted.

As for the rest of the bollocks, what the hell are they trying to tell me?

I always thought socialism was the state (run by people who were wicked in various ways) forcing people to give to the state whatever they had on the fraudulent promise that the state would dish it out to those who didn’t have, in order to make everybody happy and free.

I’ve never heard a bigger load of wicked drivel. If you want to see how it works in practice look no further than poor Russia and the emerging dictatorship of the proletariat of the EUSSR.

Belsay BugleFebruary 10, 2013 at 17:26

And that devil Marx is still buried in a Christian cemetery!

Radical RodentFebruary 11, 2013 at 10:18

Heheheh… Ironic, isn’t it? And his worshippers do seem to be happy to accept that. I wonder what they would say if his remains were removed to a place more to his ethos?

Ted TreenFebruary 11, 2013 at 16:17

I’ve seen Karl Marx’ supposed grave:- I believe it’s just a communist plot…

Fred ThrungFebruary 10, 2013 at 17:36

Anna – it’s been nice (more than nice!) in recent times to see you getting back into your stride. And Gildas is as always learned and pedagogic. But , while I admire Mr Wardman generally, I’m not sure this type of post fits into your usual output.

Thanks Fred. I’m sure that note will be taken. I think that critical comments are always helpful.

CascadianFebruary 11, 2013 at 02:00

I think Matt does us a great service reminding us that the Stalinist nutters are still out there celebrating attempted economic sabotage, and supporting themselves by selling books authored by executives of the NUT. It is more than telling that Socialist Unity uses Harold Wilson for it’s Facebook avatar, giving us a hint where most of its readers park their votes.

As to the right “type” of editorial content, I think you may be misinformed. The major attraction of the Raccoon Arms is the diversity of discussion, without Stalinist quotas or rules.

As to the artwork, I always kinda liked it, much better than most 20th century art, too bad about the message though.

Matt WardmanFebruary 11, 2013 at 11:27

I do have a genuine soft spot for hard leftist analysis, which can be very rational and dispassionate on subjects that don’t touch on their own dogmas; a little like Islamic fundies or the “Asian Values” people can be quite good on eg family breakdown in the West – we are too close to see it.

However, the prescriptions and policy are bonkers, of course.

The best one I’ve seen recently was pointing out that the war between “my rights” factions is actually a form of beakdown of multiculturalism.

CascadianFebruary 11, 2013 at 18:44

They are also sound on rape allegations from feminists, saving the “justice” dept budget multiple quids.

I wonder whether the lady in that picture is a real soviet worker or a propagandised ideal, I suspect many of us will guess at the latter.

Is it possible that a more realistic real life subject could be one of the millions of soviet women forced into uncle Joe Stalin’s appalling slave labour camps, the notorious Gulags? Many of these women were sentenced to 10 years of brutal slavery for committing terrible crimes such as being late for work three times or being married to or the daughter of a political enemy of the state.

Read here: Gulag Testimonies of the heartbreaking account by Hava Volovich describing the brutal conditions that brought the slow death of her child, or the harrowing account of Elena Glinka about the organised mass gang rapes of female gulag prisoners, or here: Women of the Gulag, about how most of the women became defeminised and brutalised to a point where some would get pregnant inside a camp in order to earn a release and then abandon the child outside the camp.

This is only for those with a strong constitution, this clip is from a 1999 BBC documentary about the Gulags and contains a recounting by the same Elena Glinka from the above link describing the ghastly conditions the women endured. GULAG – A Documentary on Stalinist Labour Camps, Part 4.

Lovely stuff this socialism, I’m so glad Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and especially the EU are rushing us further into the arms of more restrictive socialist policies.

Dear Mr Parrot, Socialism is a work of the devil. Mark Jones (who wrote the quoted apologia) is like all such people who advocate utopian solutions to what they perceive to be the miseries of life. I’ll bet he’s never even held a pneumatic drill. The girl is holding the air-hose with one hand and the drill with the other.There’s no bloody rock in sight!

He’s out of the same stable (so to speak) as that meedja studies tosser yesterday from UEA, on about ‘homosexuality’ in animals. Had he had anything to do with keeping animals he would know his vapid outpourings are simply drivel.

These people are simply not humble enough to be able to learn anything. And Cameron, Clegg, Millipede etc are cast in the same mould.